Posts with the Monica Lewinsky tag

“I am woman, hear me roar,” sang Helen Reddy over thirty years ago. Based on two recent developments involving high-profile women, that roaring comes at a price: the risk of public shaming via social media.

Photo of Monica Lewinsky by James Duncan Davidson of TED/Reuters from the TED website. Photo of Ashley Judd by Dave Martin of AP from an article on USA Today.

In a TED talk delivered on Thursday, Monica Lewinsky described herself as one of the earliest victims of cyberbullying. She also called for more compassion from Internet users, joining the large number of those already looking for solutions to online harassment. Four days earlier, actress Ashley Judd received an “avalanche” of sexually abusive tweets for remarks she made on Twitter during a University of Kentucky basketball game.

Monica Lewinsky is a curious name in American history, given the events that made her famous and her resulting legacy as a media figure. Her reemergence as a compassionate spokesperson is unfairly overlooked, however, particularly her efforts to raise awareness of issues relating to digital abuse. “Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop,” she told the TED audience on Thursday, asking that Internet users exercise judgment where the efforts of tech companies to police abuse have proven inadequate.

The case of Ms. Judd is interesting, because she is a respected actress and humanitarian who also happens to be a die-hard University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball fan. While watching her team play on Sunday, she posted a since-deleted tweet suggesting that the Wildcats were being subjected to “dirty play.” The responses she received were violently sexual, often resorting to vulgar name calling and threats. And yesterday, she was ridiculed for bringing a working dog to the game.

When when I express a stout opinion during #MarchMadness I am called a whore, c—, threatened with sexual violence. Not okay.

Later in the week, Ms. Judd announced on CNN that she would press formal charges against the Internet trolls harassing her on Twitter. “Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist,” she said. In a subsequent article on Identities.Mic, Ms. Judd (herself a survivor of sexual assault and incest) detailed the level of verbal abuse to which she was subjected:

I read in vivid language the various ways, humiliating and violent, in which my genitals, vaginal and anal, should be violated, shamed, exploited and dominated. Either the writer was going to do these things to me, or they were what I deserved. My intellect was insulted: I was called stupid, an idiot. My age, appearance and body were attacked. Even my family was thrown into the mix: Someone wrote that my “grandmother is creepy.”

In a bullying culture that reserves its most vitriolic ammunition for the female gender, misogynistic cyberattacks are rising with alarming velocity. According to a 2014 report by the Pew Research Center, women between the ages of 18 and 24 experience severe types of online harassment (with a quarter of cases being of a sexual nature), and 26% have been stalked.

Young women are particularly vulnerable to severe forms of online harassment, with 26% having been stalked and 25% sexually harassed. From a Pew Research Center study on online harassment.

While it’s easy to attribute female-directed cyberbullying as another in a long line of masochistic atrocities, there is something deeper and perhaps more sinister in digital harassment. We are living in a time where online interaction is learned at an early age, often before interpersonal skills can be cultivated as a form of common etiquette. As a result, abhorrent behavior can be explored anonymously, free of the consequences we risk when behaving badly during face-to-face contact. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley has done little to improve online decorum on user-generated content sites; even Twitter CEO Dick Costolo acknowledged this week that “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform.”

Possibly the most disconcerting aspect of the Judd case is the demarcation it exposes between male and female sports fans. Consider this hypothetical: if a man had tweeted the exact same remark at the exact same time, would it have been subjected to the same level of vitriol? Or would have been viewed as exactly what Ms. Judd intended: an innocuous comment by a passionate, loyal sports fan in support of his favorite team.

Update 03/22/15: there is a fascinating story in today’s Sunday New York Times on Monica Lewinsky’s reinvention, touching briefly on the digital harassment she received and her historical importance in exposing “humiliation as a commodity.” Recommended.

"I've done thousands of interviews and this was hands down the hardest for me. And, at the same time, I think it was cathartic for the families to share their stories in a profound way, and a profound setting." HT Milan Martin...

"While Twitter already has a reputation for its poor handling of abuse, 4chan's Operation Google campaign adds another level of complexity to an already challenging task for artificial intelligence." ...